So, the problem with watching a documentary about food is that you end up really hungry. I watched one last week called The Search for General Tso, which attempted to trace the origins of that ubiquitous Chinese dish. It’s a mostly fun, light-hearted movie, complete with interviews with all sorts of folks.
There’s the guy that started P.F. Chang’s, the immigrant in Springfield, MO, that invented cashew chicken, and the CPA that has eaten at over 6000 Chinese restaurants as a hobby. Maybe that’s part of why the documentary is so enthralling; it’s full of characters that are just real people being as odd and wonderful as real people really are. The documentary seems to be about them as much as it is about that amazing dish.
General Tso’s Chicken, if you aren’t familiar with it, is pretty simple. There are all sorts of variations, but at its core, you’ll have fried chicken--dark meat is best, a sweet sauce with varying degrees of spiciness to it, and some kind of vegetable, like broccoli. It’s delicious, and it might actually be a Chinese dish, sort of. It’s more authentically Chinese than fortune cookies, but that isn’t really saying much. It was thought up by a famous chef in the 1950s in Taiwan after he fled the Chinese mainland, and it is named after a real General from the 1800s, who famously went undefeated in his military career.
I don’t want to give too much away, in case you find yourself craving a documentary on ethnic foods, but there’s a scene where the chef who created General Tso’s Chicken looks at menu photographs from around the U.S. of his now famous dish. And he just shakes his head and laughs. This isn’t my dish. There’s chives and, what is that, broccoli? It’s all wrong. It’s almost an embarrassment.
The original dish was supposed to be enticing. It was supposed to show Americans what Chinese cuisine could be. It was supposed to convey something about a culture that struggled to get a footing in America and faced legal and societal pressures just for coming to start a new life. There were even restrictions put on what kinds of work Chinese immigrants could do.
After the Gold Rush, hardworking Americans got spooked. What are all these Easterners going to do to make a living? With limited English, it looked like the employment they would most likely find would be manufacturing and hard labor, snatching jobs right from under the God-fearing Americans. So, the government stepped in, and pushed the immigrants to find another way to work. Laundry services and restaurants were fairly unregulated, and the Chinese jumped in.
But the same Americans that were afraid of their jobs disappearing also weren’t terribly adventurous eaters, so the Chinese had to adapt. They took simple dishes from their past and Americanized the flavors, adding sugar and sticking to easily identifiable ingredients. Pork and chicken and beef, broccoli and rice and noodles. Recipes like Chop Suey popped up, a sort of culinary olive branch. And the Americans loved it!
The chef that created General Tso’s came on the scene after Americanized Chinese food had taken hold. He wanted to show Americans the real thing, while meeting them halfway enough to get them to at least try a bite. And it worked, sort of, except we wanted it to taste like what we expected Chinese food to taste like. In other words, this halfway point between Americanized Chinese food and the real thing was too much like the real thing for us, so we pulled it back to what we could recognize. Fried chicken and broccoli with a sugary sauce.
There’s an implicit question permeating this entire documentary: So what? I mean, why make a full-length film about one dish that isn’t even authentic? What’s the purpose of something like this? You could say it’s just an hour and a half long commercial to boost business for Chinese restaurants. If that’s the case, it certainly worked on me. I went out for Chinese yesterday and, wouldn’t you know, got the General Tso’s.
But it’s more than that. That guy that started P. F. Chang’s did it because he wanted to take some of the pressure out of exotic dining. The cashew chicken guy wanted to tell his story of overcoming racism and take a moment to appreciate how much things have changed in his own life. The CPA that’s visited more than 6000 Chinese restaurants is searching for a connection to his ancestors. The purpose isn’t the food, it’s a connection to something else, to something more. And just maybe an exploration of something as mundane as this can get me closer to an understanding of what Jesus is asking of us.
Over in Matthew, Jesus is talking about things as mundane as rice and chicken, namely salt and candles. “You are the salt of the earth,” he says, “but if salt has lost its taste, it is no longer good for anything. … You are the light of the world. Why would you light a candle and then cover up the flame?”
Such mundane things, but so crucial. Salt is a whole lot more to us than crystals on the dinner table. It helps clear our roadways, and it's fundamental to us at a cellular level. Salts are nearly everywhere and maintain a complex relationship with life. Each salt has a purpose, something that it does particularly well, but it doesn’t do everything on its own. And a candle is wonderful at sending out light or providing warmth or melting wax to seal an envelope. But just as salt doesn’t make things sweet, candles don’t make things wet. At their best, they are fully salt or fully candle, but they aren’t fully capable until they are matched up with something to act on or act with. They sustain life, but they are only a facet of life.
Maybe there’s something about us there. We each bring some facet of life into focus in our own way like salt, like light. There’s a quote from St. Irenaeus: “The Glory of God is the human person fully alive.” Living into who we are is our purpose, and living into that purpose fully reflects something of God. And all of us living into those disparate purposes together is a beautiful reflection of the divine. But what if we can't be heroic and brave, standing athwart the world, shining with glorious, holy purpose? What if all we can do is give a stranger a smile or a “Good morning”? What if all we can muster is sitting for a minute in prayer, naming those we love...and those we love not so much? What if all we can do is visit and sit in silence while someone else hurts? What if all we can do is try...simply try and not always succeeding...to love God and love our neighbor? This is why the mundane matters. Even when the mundane is as seemingly frivolous as, say, traveling to 6000 Chinese restaurants, there’s something to the essence of that person being lived out that is delightful, and in that delight he finds something beyond himself, maybe finds God, and we witness that.
Last Thursday, I was in the City with Brooks and Becca, and we had walked. And walked and walked. By the time the night was over, there was still more walking to be done. And my sciatica was acting up fierce, and we were having to walk really slow. I was really feeling down on myself that something as mundane as my age was holding my friends back from enjoying themselves. And Becca stopped me and said, “Do you remember how you had to push Brooks around in the Rollator during his long COVID? You did that for us. Now we get to do for you. It's no big deal.” And it wasn't. It was something as mundane as slowing down. Sauntering, rather than rushing.
Living fully into who we are, regardless of who we are, and making room for others to do the same, that’s the glory of God. That’s delight incarnate, sheds light for the world to see, seasons our lives with the salt of our neighbors. That is the glory of God! That’s what we’re about! That’s salt and candles and take out food. And all of that points us to something bigger than ourselves, leads us back to our neighbors, and leads us further again to the glory of God.
Amen.